NYSE: the other way to make a killing in Manhattan during COVID

There's an upside to everything, even the Wuhan Flu. On March 23rd the Dow Jones had fallen from its Feb 21st level of 27960.80 to an atrocious low of 18591.93. By April 23rd it had recovered to 23515.6. That means that had you bought a basket of average performing stocks at that time you'd have already made a rate of return of 26.48%

While nobody expects the Wuhan Flu to go away, and some further long term structural evaluation of several industries will ultimately be performed as the economy begins to recover, had you bought on that date (I didn't, I sadly waited to expand my portfolio until first week of April) and presuming you expect the stock market to stay at least its 2015-2019 average of 21731.20 (for those curious, the overall 2010s average was 18104.60 which in fact was lower than the drop!) then you're still looking at a 17% rate of return.

As one final note, let's appreciate how crazy that 27960.80 high under President Trump really was. From November 9th 2016 to February 23rd 2020 the average was 24360.46. Now you might call that unfair cherry picking which it is (though adding in the rest of 2020 only drops it to 24299.92 thanks to the time latency effect). Remember as always to say a little prayer for the dearly departed soul of Paul Krugman's predictive power.